Entity Registry

Starting with version 0.63, Home Assistant keeps a registry of known entities. The entity registry makes sure that entities get unique identifiers and allow customizing the identifiers and names of these entities.

Changes require that Home Assistant is shut down when you edit the file, otherwise Home Assistant may over-write your changes, and a restart of Home Assistant is required for your changes to take effect. Version 0.75 introduced a configuration user interface.

An entity needs to have a unique ID to be registered in the entity registry.
Not all integrations currently provide a unique id for their entities.

The entity registry is stored in <config>/entity_registry.yaml. As a user, you are unable to add entries, only update them. Here is an example file:

As a user, you can change the entity_id and add the name and disabled_byvalue to each entry.

Changing the first line of each entry will change the entity_id of the entity throughout Home Assistant.

The value of name will override the friendly name of the entity as given by the integration.

Added in Home Assistant 0.64.

The key disabled_by can either be hass or user. This functionality is even more experimental than the whole entity registry itself and might cause integrations to fail and might be removed in the future.

Added in Home Assistant 0.64.

Supported Components

Only components that provide a unique ID for entities will are supported.

Note that for Weather Underground, second and subsequent Personal Weather Station ID (pws_id) will have their monitored conditions suffixed with an index number.